About

    Our Impact-Driven Leadership Experience is Your Advantage

    Led by our Principal, Cate Costa, our work is guided by our commitment to impact and experience across the public, private, and nonprofit sectors. We bring a strategic lens honed by over a decade of designing, implementing, evaluating, and funding large-scale economic development programs focused on entrepreneurship as a powerful tool for wealth building. Our approach is built on a track record of leveraging more than $500MM to create, test, and scale programs that generate lasting impact.

    We bring rigor and strategic insight from managing capital, programs, and people at the highest levels to every client engagement. We approach every project with pragmatism and an unrelenting commitment to impact, even when that means defying “best practices”. Our Principal’s experience includes:

    • Architecting innovative philanthropic models: As a leader in Global Philanthropy at JPMorgan Chase & Co., Cate designed the firm’s $350MM small business commitment that supports ~200K entrepreneurs/year in communities in 37 countries across the globe. As part of this commitment, she personally deployed nearly $100MM in philanthropic capital.
    • Implementing structural changes to expand impact: Cate led the state of Illinois’ ~$600MM supplier diversity program to record contract achievement by increasing contract dollar value to diverse-owned businesses by 23%.
    • Driving change at the grass roots level: Earlier in her career, Cate served as the Director of Entrepreneurship at the Chicago Urban League where she expanded programming while turning a budget deficit into a surplus.

    This expertise is recognized across the public and private sectors. Cate was appointed by the Governor of Illinois to the State of Illinois Business Enterprise Program Council and by the Mayor of Chicago to the Chicago Task Force on Removing Barriers to Employment and Entrepreneurship. In 2021, she was named one of Crain’s Chicago’s 40 Under 40.

    Cate holds a B.A. from Mount Holyoke College and an M.B.A. from Howard University as well as an Executive Education Certificate from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. In October 2025, she will begin a Global Executive PhD at ESCP Business School, exploring how to make philanthropic support of entrepreneurship programming more effective.

    She is a lifetime member of Prospanica (formerly the National Society of Hispanic MBAs) and currently resides in Philadelphia.